Writing Women Out, Folding Gender In: The European Union "Modernises" Social Policy
Over the last fifteen years, most of the countries with liberal and social democratic welfare regimes have redesigned their social policy. This trajectory can be labeled the LEGO policy paradigm. In it, the definition of the best policy mix often targets children and youth and redeploys policy instruments to achieve goals for the future. There is a growing commitment by the European Union to this supply-side understanding of social policy. Thus, while the machinery of gender mainstreaming and equality remains in place, nonetheless, two mechanisms are at one work in the social policy field: one of writing women out of the plot and folding gender into other stories.
Crafting a New Conservative Consensus on Welfare Reform: Redefining Citizenship, Social Provision, and the Public/Private Divide
This article traces the development of conservative welfare discourse in the United States, beginning in the 1970s when a new cohort of conservative intellectuals re-articulated previously competing social and economic projects in ways that allowed their proponents to support a common welfare reform agenda. I analyze how these writers used race and gender images associated with categories from American political tradition to re-imagine citizenship and to shift the public/private boundary. In conclusion, I note how this new conservative reform project displaced the liberal understanding of citizenship that had anchored the entitlement to public assistance and promoted the simultaneous communitization and marketization of public welfare institutions.
Expanding the Subject: Violence, Care, and (In)Active Male Citizenship
We explore the implications of an employment-oriented vision of active citizenship for the gendered dimensions of welfare regimes, observing how this vision distracts attention from male violence against women and male neglect of childrearing which precipitate entrance onto welfare for many lone-mothers. We therefore question policy logics which presume that welfare dependency by lone-mothers reflects primarily a deficient work ethic. In place of this presumption, we argue for reconceptualizing active citizenship around norms that demand men to act differently, without recourse to individualized, patriarchal, racialized, and classist discourses that currently inform much fatherhood and family values rhetoric.
Geographies of Transnational Feminisms: The Politics of Place and Scale in the World March of Women
This is a study of the World March of Women, a newly emergent and innovative transnational feminist network. Through this study, I aim to contribute to scholarship on transnational feminist practices, grounded empirically in an account of the spatial praxis of the World March of Women, and enriched analytically by critical concepts in geography. I begin by problematizing conventional grammars of the local-global and transnational in feminist studies of movements, networks, and organizing. I proceed to introduce more complex theorizations of space, place, and scale imported from critical geography. I then provide an account of the emergence of the World March of Women, with an eye to analyzing its spatial praxis. I conclude by considering both the political significance of this praxis and theoretical implications for feminist analytical work on the transnational.
Who Defines Babies’ "Needs"?: The Scientization of Baby Food in Indonesia
live strong bracelet